3 min read
It gets me every time. That moment in Fiddler on the Roof when Tevye turns his back on his daughter Chava, after refusing to give his blessing to her marriage to Fyedka, a non-Jew. "If I bend that far, I will break," Tevye exclaims with a growing sense of despair. And that's the clincher for him. "There is no other hand! No, Chava! No!" he cries to the sounds of Chava's desperate screams of "Papa!".
Several generations on, and this scenario is being played out with increasing frequency in Jewish homes throughout the world. It rarely has the same sense of drama - its commonality has diminished that - but a stigma remains nevertheless.
In many respects, JPR's new study explains why . It demonstrates, statistically, just how corrosive intermarriage can be. Whereas more or less all in-married couples in Britain bring up their children as Jewish, fewer than a third of intermarried couples do so. In instances where it is the father who is the Jewish partner, that figure drops to just 10 per cent.
Out-married Jews have weaker Jewish identities than the in-married on every variable tested. They are far less likely, for example, to celebrate Jewish festivals, support Israel, or go to shul on the High Holydays. And, this inevitably rubs off on the next generation - the children of intermarried couples are at least twice as likely as the children of in-married couples to intermarry as well.
We are not told how things work out for Chava and Fyedka but, statistically, the prospects for their modern-day equivalents in Britain aren't great. Intermarried couples in Britain are more than twice as likely as in-married couples to divorce. In fact, one American Jewish statistician has even argued that intermarriage is the most significant predictor of marital breakdown. Love, it seems, does not always conquer all.
Love, it seems does not always conquer all
So, is Tevye right? Is there no other hand?
Several social researchers and analysts in the United States beg to differ. They maintain that intermarriage is indicative of successful social integration: the very fact that a Jew is able to marry a non-Jew so easily is a clear sign of how far we have come. The American Jewish intermarriage rate of 58 per cent - and the equivalent rate of 26 per cent in Britain - can be interpreted very differently when considered through the lens of the history of antisemitism.
Many also claim that the statistics fail to capture the far more nuanced reality that sits behind them. Identity is complex and fluid – most intermarried Jews and their families engage in Jewish life to some extent - but their Jewishness often expresses itself somewhat differently from that of others. Just because it doesn't register well on traditional measures, does not mean it is not present at all.
Moreover, some American social scientists have even argued that intermarriage serves to increase Jewish population size. Their logic goes like this: if two Jews marry non-Jews and have two children each, as long as more than half of those children are brought up as Jews, that will produce more Jews overall than if two Jews had married each other and had two Jewishly identifying children between them.
There is some truth in all these arguments, but none overcomes the cold hard facts. Yes, there are exceptions; yes, identity is fluid; yes, integration has brought tremendous benefits, but there is no getting away from basic statistical reality. Intermarriage is corrosive to Judaism.
Yet there is another hand. JPR's research shows that there are 36,000 Fyedkas in Britain today - non-Jews married to self-identifying Jews. That number rises to 53,000 when we include non-Jewish dependent children of such unions. And that is just in Britain. Demographic estimates indicate that, globally, the number of non-Jews living with Jews is approximately 6,000,000. So whatever intermarriage does or does not do, one fact is irrefutable: it creates a huge appendage to the core Jewish population.
The state of Israel legally includes all of these people under the terms of the Law of Return. They are all entitled to make aliyah. Yet, too often in our homes, or our communities, we are rather less hospitable. And therein lies the challenge. On the one hand, we know how damaging intermarriage can be. On the other, it creates a huge sub-group strongly connected to the Jewish People who could be among our strongest allies, but who often feel alienated or rejected.
All of which leaves us with the following dilemma: can we discourage intermarriage in general without stigmatising those who love and marry Jews?
Jonathan Boyd is Executive Director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research
